By Joseph Kanon
Simon & Schuster, £12.99
Joseph Kanon has written six novels, all set in the dark years following 1945, and taking a real event - the Potsdam Conference, the Manhattan Project - as the background for a murder case.
Leaving Berlin, Kanon's latest, is set in Berlin in 1948, at the time of the Berlin Airlift and the escalation of the Cold War. The central character is Alex Meier, a Jewish writer, who fled Nazi Germany for America before the war.
Meier gets caught up in the McCarthy witch-hunt and, faced with deportation, he makes a deal with US intelligence. He will return to Soviet-occupied Berlin as an American secret agent and, if he does a good job, he will be allowed to return to the States, and his beloved son Peter.
This is just the beginning, in what becomes an exciting thriller. Meier is soon also working for East German intelligence in a world in which no one can be trusted. Amid the rubble of post-war Berlin, people disappear, bodies pile up and Meier is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
He captures the feel and desolation of a city divided between west and east
Kanon evokes post-war Berlin superbly well. He has done his research and captures the feel and desolation of a city divided between west and east. The narrative is full of famous émigrés like Bertolt Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel, and brings Brecht's cynicism brilliantly to life.
Above all, Kanon creates a fascinating, multi-layered sense of the past. There is the Berlin of Meier's childhood, before the Nazis, caught in flashbacks, especially of an intense affair with the beautiful young Irene. Then there is the Nazi time: those who stayed and made a pact with the devil and those who escaped, like Meier and Brecht to America, or like the superbly sinister Markus Engel, who spent the war in Moscow.
Everywhere, there are ghosts from the past: those who stayed and suffered, those who stayed and compromised and those who left and have returned to point an accusing finger.
The novel reads like a film noir. It's like Graham Greene's Vienna or Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy. Wherever you look there are no heroes, just corruption and betrayal. "That's the choice now in Berlin," an ex-Nazi tells Meier. "Be a criminal or a spy." When his American boss tells Meier, "we're the good guys here," the one thing you can be sure of is that they're not.
And then there is the sex. Meier is reunited with the beautiful, irresistible Irene. She is already having an affair with a Soviet spymaster. So who is spying on whom? Should Meier stay in Berlin with her or return to his son in America? All the time, Meier feels "his real life is bleeding out". But which is "his real life"?
Leaving Berlin is an enthralling book, dragging you ever deeper into its complex world of smoke and mirrors. It is a gripping introduction to Kanon, the new Le Carré.
